Is the Anglophile Right a Prisoner of the Western Paradigm?

[ Raghavan Srinivasan – one of the CRI readers has submitted the below article as a reaction to the post titled “Strands Of Anti-Westernism In Indian Politics” published by CRI last week. CRI is carrying this post as a part of our commitment to an open dialogue ]

I am an avid follower of CRI and try my best to follow the articles published (including the one on Nietzsche!) However, over the last few weeks I found myself wondering if the thinking in CRI had become somewhat stereotyped. The discussions seem to be slight variations around a central theme (more like disagreements between ideologues) and moreover do not seem to provide a robust take home end point. For example, how improve the horrible state of education? – bring in the foreigners says one group, no, no, no says the other. Wretched medical care – privatize, remove supply side constraints, increase competition and, voila, see the situation improve miraculously! FDI in retail? Yes, yes and some more yes, too bad some local mom and pop kiranas will become extinct, but what the heck, that is the price you pay for progress. No, no and again no, scream the others, we are bringing the East India Company again. Is CRI (by CRI I mean the Anglophile Right) starting to sound like a scratched gramophone record?

Mr. Jaideep Prabhu’s (JAP) recent post, “Strands of Anti-Westernism in Indian Politics” was just the tipping point and helped to crystallize my views. I think the Anglophile Right is unable to provide definite solutions to the problems faced by India because it it stuck in the Western Paradigm. I shall use Mr. JAP’s post as an illustration only, to explain, as we say in Tamil, “oru paanai sotrukku oru soru padham” (Checking one grain is enough to assess if the whole pot of rice is cooked). This writeup is not to be only considered as a critique of JAP’s post. I request readers to focus on the larger picture, the forest instead of the trees.

It is not my intention to lecture CRI and I would be grateful if readers consider this writeup as a well wisher thinking out loud!

JAP, aka the Anglophile Right (AR) is perplexed by the hostility – vitriol no less, exhibited by a certain Anglophobic fringe of the Hindutva and Swadeshi Right (A-H&SR). Opposition by the Hindutva group on a cultural basis is understandable, they reason, but why does part of the economic Swadeshi group also froth at the mouth at the mere sight of the AR?

The AR feels that this hostility on part of the A-H&SR is due to an “inferiority complex”. “it is the inability of the ‘local’….”, aha! note the word ‘local’. If ever there was a smoking gun, this is it! If we accept that the A-H&SR are ‘local’ are we excused if we say that the AR

is ‘foreign’, if not in domicile, at least in thought? But more on this later!

To continue,”….conservatives to find a plausible indigenous intellectual alternative to the European ideas of the last three centuries”. And, pray, what are the European ideas that are giving the ‘local’ A-H&SR such an inferiority complex? “Modernity, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the nation state” proudly proclaim the AR. Bereft of ideas and wracked by an awful inferiority complex the A-H&SR demonizes the West in “incoherent, illogical, factually suspect and sometimes not even topical manner” My, my!

“This vitriol is not borne out by any logical analysis”, says the AR. Well, the A-H&SR humbly begs to disagree. We shall consider some facts, shall we?

In 1750, India and China accounted for 75% of the world’s industrial production. Even till 1830, that is a mere 180 years ago, India and China accounted for 60% of the world’s industrial production. India produced better steel than Sheffield, built ships, produced vast amounts of textiles, dyes and a hundred other diverse commodities.

Paddy production in Chengalpattu (near the present Chennai) in 1760 to 1770 amounted to 5 to 6 tons per hectare, probably better than the output in modern India. Indian agricultural labourers earned higher real wages compared to labourers in England.

“Every village has a school”, Sir Thomas Munro. “There is hardly a village, great or small, throughout our territories, in which there is not at least one school, and in larger villages, more.” G L Prendergast, 1820. “There are 1,00,000 village schools in Bengal and Bihar alone”. William Adam 1830. (The Legend of the Hundred Thousand Schools). Further reports to London from the local Collectors state that the duration of study varied between 5 to 15 years and all the four castes were represented amongst the students. Contrast this with England. The total number of schools, both private and public, in England, in 1801 was 3,363. The total number attending those schools was around 40,000 and “…the average length of school life rises on a favourable estimate from about 1 year in 1835 to about 2 years in 1851”.

India had a written Constitution and a functioning democracy in the 9-10 century AD itself. The Constitution and the Methodology of Elections and Administration is chiseled in stone and empaneled for all to see in Uttaramerur Temple, 35 Km from Kanchipuram. Did not the same Cholas spread the ‘local’ culture all over the Far East?

The ‘local’ A-H&SR did have very much better intellectual alternatives to European ideas, and that is the reason the Europeans risked life and limb to come to India. The ‘locals’ grasped the hand extended supposedly for trade in good faith but later discovered that it had morphed into a balled fist for loot and rapine.

The AR still blithely sees economic opposition to the West as “economic nationalism that bears an eerie similarity to protectionism”. No wonder the A-H&SR become rabid at the sight of the AR!

Well, as I said earlier, the aim of this article is not to merely critique JAP or speak up for the A-H&SR. The aim is to try to understand the thought process of the AR which makes it think in this manner.

“A reliable alternative should be offered” cackles the AR. Shall we flip the statement around? Has the AR offered any real alternatives except engagement with the West? “India needs all the help it can get from international investors in most sectors of the economy”.

Why is the AR unable to see beyond the West? The answer lies in the fact that the Brown Sahibs of the past and the present are all products of their Anglo education and are prisoners to that paradigm. Poor education – bring Oxbridge, bad retail – get the Company back, no medical care – privatize and increase competition! The AR is indeed a stuck gramophone record, it just keeps repeating “West, West, West” ad infinitum. The Brown Sahibs of the past have merely evolved into ‘Dubashi Sahibs’ of the present – note how they subconsciously consider the A-H&SR as ‘locals’! Agreed the Dubashi Sahibs are all quite erudite, but alas, unless the Anglophile Dubashi Right, hereafter referred to as the Dubashi Right (DR), come out of that paradigm, they will have incommensurable difficulty in finding lasting solutions to India’s problems. Solutions which may seem to work in one particular paradigm certainly fail in another different paradigm.

Is there an alternate paradigm? There is, and it is staring at us, right in front of our eyes, at Uttaramerur. It is just not obvious to the DR! Being prisoners of their paradigm, they are simply blind to it. Was not the decentralized Panchayat System and through it, the King, the rightful owner of Power and upholder of Dharma in India since ancient times? Was this system not ‘reliable’ enough to produce a school in every village, 6 tons of paddy per hectare and sublimely beautiful philosophy, spread by word of mouth and not through the sword?

Should not the British Imperial Power been transferred to the original rightful owner, the Panchayat Administration System in 1947? Were the Indians, 90%+ villagers in 1950, just liberated from slavery and recovering from the horrors of Partition offered adequate explanation about the new Constitution and means of governance? Was the opinion of the common man (there were no mango men at that time!) consulted by any means at all? Or did the Anglophile Brown Sahibs just casually usurp the ancient right of the Panchayats by gratuitously continuing the old thought process of the British, “…that barbarous India could be civilized only by discarding its innate Indian-ness (Mill), embrace Christianity (William Wilberforce), or become anglicized (Macaulay) and become Western (Karl Marx)?”

Reinstall the King, I say! Vazhga Glorious Viranarayana, Prosperous Parakesari, the Illustrious Parantakadeva Chozha Maamannan, the Conqueror of Madurai, Vaazhga!Vaazhga! Needoodi Vaazhgave! (Needoodi Vaazhga – long live in Tamil) (Ordered the inscription to be put up)

May the Lord Sundaravaradhan, (Uttaramerur) liberate the DR from Maaya!

Koi hai? Bada peg lao, and while you are at it bring my Nietzsche! (A thousand apologies, Mr. Krishna Rao!)

References:

[1] All the information, figures and quotes (not attributable to JAP) are taken from Dharampal’s Collected Writings in 5 volumes. These books can be downloaded from www.samanvaya.com/dharampal I strongly exhort everybody to put them on their reading lists (at least as the 101st!). They are certainly useful for paradigm shifts!

[2] Uttaramerur – please Google. The inscription and its translation is freely available in the Web.

Hi!

Team CRI have just launched Swarajya! Check it out!

waiting for such rebuttal. you need to be more cynical and portray the speeches of “Lords” and “Gentlemen” in British parliaments and Company officials that compiled by Dharampal. It gives a classic view of the British design of looting simple civilized Indians of that time. Nice job.

http://twitter.com/knackofflying Sonam Agrawal

I hope we can get rid of the dichotomous thinking – either wholesale west in, or wholesale west out. I often see it as two sides of the same coin.
We cannot define ourselves as Not-West. If we do so then it would be a calamity. Pakistan has aimed to define itself as not-India, and the results are for all to see. It is obsessed with throwing out of its lives everything that is Indian. If people are thinking that conservatism is a thing unique to the east then they are woefully mistaken. Protectionism is a popular theme everywhere. Until we see people as individuals I dont think we can get a lot farther.
What we need is the ability to independently analyse and most importantly listen to ideas from everywhere. We cannot bickering over labels of ‘swadeshi’ and ‘videshi’.

This post is the polite end of the problem I was talking about in ‘Strands of Anti-Westernism.’

1. You make an issue of the word “local.” To me, at least, this is just as asinine as making an issue of the word “vernacular.” There is no denigration meant, but offence is taken merely to obfuscate other issues.

2. Is the AR foreign? As with the H&SR, there is a spectrum. Some will immediately try to copy-paste US solutions on India, while others may advocate a variety of solutions and be open to local inputs, be they from Africa or from India. One might instead want to ask a more useful question: why is the template Western upon which local modifications are added? But I suppose that would need time off from chest-thumping. Anyway, to answer the reflective question, it is largely a matter of data. Western methods – be they in healthcare, irrigation, energy, microloans, airline travels, education, finance or whatever else – is far better documented and data more readily available, sometimes online. I challenge anyone to do similar research on India from Indian sources.

3. Perhaps “Indians” from 1750 did not have an inferiority complex. In my own research, I know for a fact that there was no sense of inferiority at least until the late 1600s. But if anyone has had time to notice, since 1750, India has been colonised and even won its independence! And guess what…it has become poorer in the process. Decades of socialism ensured that it stays that way. So, this typical strategy of the unthinking nationalist is bogus because it is irrelevant to the present circumstances.

4. “India” did not have a written constitution in the 9th century, though a few kingdoms in India might have. But how does that matter? The Icelanders had a parliament as far back as 930 CE, but if anyone thinks it is the same as what we see today, they need another history lesson! Of course, if anyone is claiming that this document has shaped India’s response to the Enlightenment and other ideas, I am waiting to see how.

5. Europe came to India, as did many others, for trade and not for intellectual alternatives. Conflating the two is yet another sign of a narrative desperate to prove its worth. The West has been militarily superior for the past 500 years, and materially so for the past 250…in that time, they also produced a plethora of scientists and philosophers who changed the world as we know it. Was there an Indic response? Outside of religious revival? If so, clearly, it has not been documented well. Now please, go on and tell me how wonderful everything was in 2000 BCE!! What else is there to rely on since the failure in modernity has been resounding?

6. The AR needs to propose no alternative – it has proposed the referent models. Some are good, others are irrelevant to India. Nonetheless, there are plans and data that help growth and development. The question is, which has still not been answered, what is the radical Right’s alternative if they don’t trust US weapons, are suspicious of US nuclear trade, have disdain fro FDI, reject the modern notion of the liberty of the individual, and rubbish Western literature without reading much of it? Are any of these alternatives feasible in the modern era?

7. It is a pity that Right critics of modernity in India do not even have a clue as to what the real West is, because when Karl Marx is the stand-in for all Westernisation…oy, the less said on this, the better!

As I said at the outset, this response is a polite version of the discourse emanating from the knee-jerk Right. The issue raised in ‘Strands of Anti-Westernism’ was specifically the uncritical rejection of foreign ideas, not an argument for the superiority of one over another (anyone who has lived long enough will know that every option, no matter how nice it looks, will always have trade-offs). This reader’s response has underscored that point. I think one of the commentators, Sonam Agrawal, nails perfectly what I was saying in my original post: “We cannot define ourselves as Not-West. If we do so then it would be a calamity. Pakistan has aimed to define itself as not-India, and the results are for all to see…What we need is the ability to independently analyse and most importantly listen to ideas from everywhere. We cannot bickering over labels of ‘swadeshi’ and ‘videshi.'”

Raghavan Srinivasan

Let me declare at the beginning itself that I am a great admirer of your posts and usually find myself nodding my head in agreement with your views. The points you make in your reply are all valid and true. No doubt about it. The ‘knee-jerk’ right may not have any readymade reply to the Western narrative of the last three centuries. Maybe a civilization struggling to avoid cultural annihilation did not have any time or energy for anything else but survival – but that is not the topic for discussion.

As commentator Sonam Agarwal says, “we cannot define ourselves as not-West”. I agree. We cannot be non-anything. We first of all have to be “us”. We did have an illustrious past, agreed that was all in the past millennia. Dharampal does suggest that we had a reasonably good recent past. There seems to be some data as put out by Dharampal and should we not study this and maybe other sources, if any, to get a better understanding of ourselves and our recent past?

Unless we have a clear idea about our recent past, the precise reasons how and why we were colonized and the thought process of the colonizers, do we not risk repeating the same old mistakes again?

There was a functional ‘Eastern’ template that could produce a ‘school in every village’. I feel that we should first understand that template which did seem to work in our local milieu before writing on a ‘Western’ template. Inability to see the ‘Eastern’ template is what I mean by being a ‘prisoner to the Western Paradigm’. Can an ‘Eastern’ result come from a ‘Western’ template? We have to study it first, modify it to fit our times, maybe rewrite it considerably, but I leave that task to intellectuals of your calibre! Leave me the lazy task of being an armchair critic!

I am sure you know it but I was not trying to rubbish Western literature with the reference to Nietzsche. “Endaro mahanubhavulu andhariki vandhanamulu” (numerous are great men, salutations to them all, Saint Tyagaraja). Kindly pardon my insipid attempts at humor and the ‘chest thumping’ was for ‘drama’!

Sir, I am fine with disagreement, you know that! I just seek a good reason for an argument, not emotion. In my earlier post, I specifically stated that it was not even all the H&SR that was anti-Western. I am speaking of a minority. Some of them may not even have any ill-will towards the West, but their pride in their own culture blinds them to the merits of others.

Your response to my comments is all I expect in a discussion – an open consideration of ALL ideas, Eastern or Western. I do not see this reception more often than one would suspect. I have NGO friends who have worked with sick kids in Maharashtra interiors who have told me first hand accounts of how many Western ideas, even medicines, don’t work in Indian conditions. So I appreciate the need for local expertise over international abstract theories. Yet it sets me off when the critique of an argument is that it is foreign. For example, let us say, I write a post on the political structure of the BJP. Let us also say I use Western political theories from Hobbes to Rawls. The first response I have heard when I have made this analysis in casual conversations is, “Yaah, but they are all Europeans. What do our thinkers say?” Perhaps one should listen to the idea, see where it fails (if it does) and then see how it can be remedied with other Eastern or Western ideas. For me, Vidura, Bheeshma, Kautilya, Machiavelli, Aristotle, Hobbes, are all only as good as the relevance of their ideas in the analysis I am doing. Wasn’t that what the Rig Veda advocates anyway? 🙂

http://twitter.com/yitsjha hrishikesh jha

Lovely article… I also believe that we should first grind out the knowledge from our past and base our present systems like education,health,housing,land use etc on them though not blindly probably after that we can reach out to the west. maybe I am a very less informed soul but would like to recommend some of ” Rajiv Dixit’s” video on Indian education system .

“Koi hai? Bada peg lao, and while you are at it bring my Nietzsche! (A thousand apologies, Mr. Krishna Rao!)”

http://twitter.com/pp_chn pp_chn

“Until we see people as individuals I dont think we can get a lot farther.” This is the reason why USA/West’s social system is crumbling, with illegitmate births on the rise.

http://twitter.com/pp_chn pp_chn

The functional Eastern template that produced a school in every village, depended on notions of duty & heredity unlike the Western/liberal template which depends on notions of ‘liberty – free to do what one wants’ & ‘rights’ to do what one wants. Hence the failure we are seeing in modern India. No amount of copying USA style policies will bring modern India on par with the wealthy medieval India.

http://twitter.com/pp_chn pp_chn

“Perhaps one should listen to the idea, see where it fails (if it does) and then see how it can be remedied with other Eastern or Western ideas. ”

The main problem with AR, is that AR gets to JUDGE the *Hindu ideas*, against the Western ideas of “liberalism”, “equality” and says these ideas are not acceptable in the ‘modern’ era.

Take for eg., the education system followed till British dismantled it. Vocation passed from father to son, people had what we call ‘job security’. If AH&SR point this out, this is rubbished as ‘not feasible’, ‘not advisable’ because this idea is being judged based on *liberal notion* of ‘equality’.

Same with ‘women’s rights’. *Hindu* notions of women’s place in society rejected because they don’t fit the *idea* of equality. Same with “land” being treated as a commodity in the *liberal world* whereas its not in *Hindu* philosophy, being passed from father to son.

Agree on the professions thing completely. The difficulty arises on how it is phrased. We don’t follow vocations because “our glorious ancestors” did so, but because there are very sound social and economic reasons.

Even on ayurveda and other such medicine, one cannot expect folks to accept mumbo jumbo stuff. Do the research and prove the claims. I know of some research on neem and haldi…why not others?

http://twitter.com/pp_chn pp_chn

/* The difficulty arises on how it is phrased. */ For whom, is it difficult?

/* We don’t follow vocations because “our glorious ancestors” did so */

Who is the ‘we’?

Not sure where / how ayurveda fits into the point I made about how AR gets to judge AH & SR stances on *liberal* ideas.

Skanda

You don’t need to phrase it unless you are in a situation of having to rationalize everything including your existence the way it is. Which is itself the result of judgmental attitude of west.

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